What “search” features do you use that people may have overlooked?
Built-in features
The Find box, Jump to, Go menu, Search Bar and Bookmarks menu are probably the among the most under-utilized standard features. Explore the linked wiki sections to learn more about using them.
And Custom Filters and Regular Expressions in the Filter Gramplets can be used as intricately or basically as you care to explore. And the Isotammi SuperTool can build bespoke Custom Filters and Rules while requiring only a little Python audacity. You could spend a lifetime exploring these features.
There are a couple more Easter Eggs related to searching that you might not have noticed. @SNoiraud kindly introduced me to a couple that greatly accelerated my ability to finding ‘nearby’ objects in listings and hierarchies.
- In the Object Selector dialogs, you can avoid a lot of scrolling and drill-down by using a hidden feature of the Find. The Find will filter to exact matches and, by default, the Clear scrolls back to top of the full list. What is not obvious is that selecting a row in the result will snap to that entry when the Clear resets to the full list.
See the Tip in the Place Selector documentation for an example. - When walking through records to fix in a Sorted list, saving the records might shift the selected record’s position in the list… causing you to lose track of the next item in the worklist. (Particularly common since worklists will normally be sorted on the item being changed.) Changing the Active Record focus before clicking the OK button can avoid losing your place in your sorted worklist. But, if you forgot to take that precaution, clicking the < Back (or its keybindings) will scroll back to the spot where the record was previously in the worklist.
Addon plug-in opportunities
The Recent Items addon plug-in library by @kku often eliminates the need to drill-down through an Object Selector. It add a short list of recently used Objects at the top of the dialog.
The Fulltext Search experimental addon tool by @kku (published in his experimental collection) needs to build an index before it can be used. But then it can simultaneously searches broadly (across selected object categories) and deeply (through secondary objects and attributes)
The orphaned Search Gramplet by Ivan Komaritsyn (vantu5z) is a search-as-you-type that looks at multiple fields simultaneously. The results list can be used as a drag’n’drop palette and is object clip-boarding compatible.
The WebSearch gramplet addon by @Urchello let you do searches across multiple external sites based on information in the Gramps tree. You only need to enter data once in Gramps and it fills in the recognized search forms or passes the URL-based search parameters.
Customizations / Hacks
In my Addon Manager and Plugin Manager enhanced, Claude added some features. The search was extended to look through all the plug-in registration fields… including Author searching.
In the Plugin Manager enhanced, added options to filter the subsets of plug-ins.
In the Addon Manager, Claude made the lozenges into active buttons instead or merely readouts.
